Sport, life, This Sporting Life, and the hypertopia

Abstract

Sport has classically been regarded as an ‘elsewhere’, a leisure activity set apart from the serious business of life. Sociological critiques of sport, however, emphasise its importance in transmitting ideology, and its responsiveness to historical change. The question, then, is how does this ‘elsewhere’ connect to the everyday? The article proposes that the spaces of sport generally function as a hypertopia, which involves a going beyond of the normative, rather than the Foucauldian idea of the heterotopia or utopia, which foreground difference. By analysing Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life in terms of the hypertopia, it is possible to rethink sport's connection to hegemonic social orders, and consider the way filmic representations of sport constantly engage with this sense of ‘going beyond’.